Hoppe

Props for Jim Irsay

He's known to be a mad tweeter, a man prone to sending
micro-messages of epic proportions. A photographer once got him to pose
bare-chested with a guitar for a not-so-complimentary profile in the Chicago Tribune. Then there was that
time he got his name in the papers because an appetite for prescription drugs
got the better of him.

His name is Jim Irsay. He's the owner of the
Indianapolis Colts. I think it's time we gave him some love.

I realize there's a moving van-full of reasons to take
exception to the guy — especially in a town where jaywalking is enough to
brand you a renegade. At first blush, Jim's the quintessential plutocrat. One
of Indiana's richest individuals, he came by his fortune through his father,
Bob, a hard-drinking, foul-mouthed cuss who made his money in Chicago. After
promising the people in Baltimore he wasn't going to move their team, Bob
loaded up a convoy of Mayflower trucks and moved the Colts to Indianapolis in
1984.

Two years later, Sports
Illustrated had this to say about Bob Irsay: "Getting a fix on [the]
Indianapolis Colts owner É isn't easy, but this is certain — he has
turned one of the NFL's best franchises into a laughingstock."

Bob Irsay died in 1997. The
Colts was Jim's inheritance. He made his first moves within weeks, hiring Bill
Polian to head the Colts' front office, then giving Polian the go-ahead to select
Peyton Manning in the 1998 draft. The rest is football history. Manning led the
Colts to a Super Bowl victory, winning multiple Most Valuable Player awards in
what will be a Hall of Fame career.

Just as important, the Colts went from laughingstock
to being one of the NFL's most respected teams. Not only did they win, they
were good citizens — smart and classy.

Jim Irsay didn't stop there. He made sure his team
wove itself into the fabric of life in central Indiana. He was smart enough to
realize that fans here were fickle. They weren't drawn to sports or teams so
much as to winning itself. As the Colts won, their following increased to the
point where, today, Indianapolis is a football town, with a tax-supported
stadium and a roundly-praised stint as Super Bowl host under its belt.

Getting that stadium, of course, was sticky. It
required posturing and tough talk. There were, if not threats, then broad hints
that if the Colts couldn't play in a new megastadium, well, maybe they'd have
to go elsewhere, to a larger market. Irsay the younger tried hard not to sound
like his dad, but comparisons were inevitable.

Finally landing Super Bowl 46 forgave all that. The
corporate orgy that doubles as America's Big Game put Indianapolis on the
national stage. It was the culmination of 30 years' worth of downtown
rehabilitation that started before the Irsays came to town but, oddly enough,
might never have been so fully realized without that crazy contest to serve as
focus and ultimate prize.

As this history has unfolded, Jim Irsay has followed his
idiosyncratic star: hanging out with aging rock legends, collecting their
guitars, spending a small fortune for the scroll on which Jack Kerouac typed
his novel, On the Road. In these
pursuits, though, he has revealed little more about himself than that he is a
pop culture fan of a certain age, albeit one with a commodious checkbook.

It took a crisis to show us who Jim Irsay really is.
First was last year's lost football season, as St. Peyton languished on the
sideline after a series of surgeries to his neck. The team lost all but two
games, meaning they would have first dibs on the nation's top college player, a
quarterback improbably named Andrew Luck.

After a calamitous season, it's easy to talk about backing
up the truck. In fact, few owners actually have the nerve to dismantle
everything they've built. It's a gamble, and if it doesn't work you'll be
called a fool, or worse.

But, in a rapid sequence of tectonic decisions, Jim
Irsay not only backed up the truck, he stuffed it. He cleared away his front
office staff and jettisoned most of his veteran players. He bade a tearful
farewell to St. Peyton, a move that, it turns out, was brilliantly
accommodating for both men.

Incredibly, everything Jim Irsay did worked. What the
Colts have accomplished so far this year is the stuff of sports fairy tales.
Things could have gone wrong in so many ways. Who could have foreseen the new
head coach, Chuck Pagano, coming
down with leukemia? And if all Luck's wins were losses, how do you think we'd
be feeling about Manning's success in Denver?

Jim has been bold in ways that put most sports moguls
to shame. Even better, in a town that likes to order its changes in petite
sizes, he's put on a clinic about the good things smart
risk-taking can bring. Last winter a lot of people probably thought Jim's
radical moves were nuts — that he was Jim being Jim again and, well, Jim's
a nut. But he is our nut and, when it comes to football, he's really pretty
cool.